Spring fever?

April is the cruelest month -- oh yeah!

 April 13, 1982

There’s a grayness about, a fog that flows out of me, a terrible, terrible fog which shrouds my thoughts and hints of uncertain tomorrows. And I don’t even know what it is that pulls at me, causes my depression to rise.

The depression always comes -- shocking, invincible, but as certain as the morning.

The hints come through the dreams, the whispers hissed.

Louise and Ruby are part the problem, my past spread out in front of me to reexamine.

But it isn’t just that.

I have looked at it already from a dozen different perspectives, from this way and that, from over my shoulder, from under my covers, from around the corner. It is always the same, covered with the same shocking failures

Outside, the geese sound, their weary hocking talking of  rebirth, their terrible sound reminding me of the permanent changes which always some this time of year. I’ll probably die in the spring, covered with the old mulch of autumn’s fallen wet leaves, covered with the brown dirt and thick roots of softening spring.

It feels like death now, with the oncoming cycle I must grin and bear. But it isn’t death. It is only a dream, not even a nightmare.

The nightmares are ages old and I no longer mind them. The nightmares are the uncompromising forces over which I have no control, and yet tear at my insides – the will with which I resist Louise is part of this. She is the most uncompromising force of all, and for years has been the stone around my neck, guilt of which drags me inch by inch into hell. My daughter is the chain that binds me to Louise, and the eagles – with their terrible claws – are the memories that pass, the what ifs unrealized, those years my daughter had to grow up without a father – or too many fathers none of which are really hers, or who have paid for the privilege of being so for an hour or a night.

Maybe I’m my own grayness, and the cause of the depression that settles on me as I search for someone else to blame, my own pain turned inward, telling on me, abusing myself with hope and self pity alternately.

I should be outraged, I should be thundering my commands to Louise,  a foolish gesture to make her change, when I have no right, and all such tactics used in my youth always failed, my shock, my outrage, my hypocritical morality only making her feel so much more threatened, so that I always made things worse by trying to make them better, a lesson I have since learned in learning to let things be as they must be, and how much I must be like my own father who ran away from me when confronted by the responsibilities of fatherhood, and how if I am to help Louise, I cannot judge her, if I am to help myself, I must choose what role in life I must play, and that love is a bigger thing than any of the other stuff that transpired before or since my knowing her, and that my daughter, knows who I am finally, and knows real love, and that she is not a chain, and memories do not have to be the eagles plucking at me, and that Louise isn’t a stone, but a free spirit, who I loved and still love and will always love, and that I am someone who needs understand that love means accepting things as they are, people as they are, and doing what I do to make the world better without imposing it on anyone.

And strangely, as I think these things, the geese honking turns to music inside of me, and the fog that I exhale becomes spiritual gift to the world, halos of a new heaven to which I might aspire.

Maybe I will die in spring, and find rebirth from the muck of my own foolish thinking, and my own foolish limitations.